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  Will 7:00 am on June 17, 2010 Permalink | Reply  

  Earl’s Potato Salad (Chapter 2) 

  

  Harland David “Colonel” Sanders said, “I won’t sell a fat yellow chicken.” It’s that kind of statement that could ignite a ignite world war. At the very least, the third world war could be blamed on the controversial media storm caused by a statement like that. Anyway, Colonel Sanders was known to say things that could result in cataclysmic global destruction. No, that was Bo Pilgrim. Colonel Sanders said, “There’s no reason to be the richest man in the cemetery.” I agree with that.

  Lonnie “Bo” Pilgrim, the renowned Texas chicken underlord, was known for saying things that could inflame global tensions. He once caused a riot in the Texas State Senate for kicking over tables and shouting, “I’ve got your $10,000 right here!”

  Contrary to common knowledge, Lonnie Pilgrim was born in Russia. Well, in an alternate reality he was born in Verkhoyansk, Russia.

  Verkhoyansk is also home to the only prosthetic head manufacturer in existence. The Köppen Replacement Head Parts factory secretly employs 800 of Verkhoyansk’s 1500 citizens, designing and producing a wide range of facsimile replacement heads.

  The Verkhoyansk heads are not widely available and are profoundly expensive. It takes 24 technicians, 32 human replication artists, 19 software programmers, 12 hardware debuggers, 85 machine operators, 100 middle managers, 200 executives, and 1 prophet thirteen months to produce one prosthetic head. After production, the head is subjected to another thirteen months of quality assurance testing. After quality assurance testing, the head is air-sealed and stored in a wooden box for thirteen months in what is referred to as The Maturing Phase, after which point the head is ready to be packaged and distributed.

  The customers of Köppen Replacement Head Parts remark on how extraordinarily realistic their heads are, how they’re sure that they’re now more intelligent and charming than ever, and how they wouldn’t be caught dead without it. The manufacturer has never received a customer complaint, owing, undoubtably, to the thought suppression microchip embedded in every prosthetic head.

  Unfortunately, most of the prosthetic heads that originate in Verkhoyansk look unmistakably Russian. One model, PKS-1191-b, has an enchanting western European design. The specifications document (translated into English by Vladimir Lelyushenko, employee I.D. 113191) describe the PDS-1191-b as:

  Most beautiful remark of European empress
  Emotes of royal power and grace
  Pale to slender of neck
  Attachment clips of true lock
  Modulators/the demodulator of nerve
  Filters of spinal fusion
  Length of shimmering hair
  Deep grasping of eyes

  The Verkhoyansk prosthetic head manufacturer has produced only two PKS-1191-b model heads. One was sold immediately. The buyer’s records are not available, having been sealed in a plastic tube, blasted into outer space, brought onboard the International Space Station, and eaten by a very deranged Russian cosmonaut who said later, “Those were the worst thirteen days of my life.” The other PKS-1191-b head was shelved shortly before the design was discontinued.

  It seems very few people are interested in looking like a western European empress.

  Scott awoke in the middle of a Barnes and Noble, sitting on what moments before was a booth from where moments before there had been a popular eating establishment in what moments before was his version of reality. He was instantly convinced that he’d reached the bottom floor in the business tower where the corporate headquarters of the Strange and Bizarre could be found. He had, in fact, just entered the building. And he’d entered through the front door. Elvis exited through the parking garage.

  “Where can I find books on Transdimensional Phenomenon?” he asked.

  A very young and nervous sales attendee with a sminy name badge stared back and slowly began his response.

  “Uh, Row 22, across from the International Travel section,” he began to sweat one of those panicked sweats that you see in a competitive figure skater that just flubbed a signature sit spin.

  Scott abandoned the bewildered sales professional mumbling over the twelve-foot-square space of pink vinyl, cotton wadding, ceramic shards, and foam. “I need a cleanup,” he stammered, “Derek? Melody? Guys?”

  Row 22 contained a diverse range of topics, from How to Construct a Temporary Genetics Lab to Role Playing Strategy Games. The department sign above the row read, “General Curiosities/Unpopular Topics.” There were three books on Transdimensional Phenomenon.

  The first, How To Vacation in Alternate Dimensions on a Budget, consisted mostly of profiles of restaurants, hotels, and entertainment venues in a variety of alternate dimensions. As fascinating as he found the review of the five-star Grover Cleveland Luxury Bed and Bath (named for the revival preacher, not the president of the United States), Scott found no useful information that could explain how a small section of a lunar deli could suddenly end up in a retail bookseller.

  The next book he picked up was titled Transdimentional Phenomenon and Your Self-Image. Its title barely captured its absurdity: a step-by-step guide for building confidence by projecting images of alternate versions of the self.

  Imagine yourself as a giant financial power, driving influential financial deals or negotiating major corporate mergers and investments. Say to yourself, “You are a captain of industry, a king of finance, a deity among lesser beings.” Stare at yourself in the mirror and try to intimidate yourself, “You are a powerful and fierce creature. You will take and not return. You will be. And in being, you will transcend your need for self image. In transcending, you will find yourself aware that you have no need to consider yourself. For you are. And when you are, you need not wonder at your being. For you are. And if you are, you have been. And since you have been, you need not be again. You are.

  Book two was returned to the shelf. The third and final book would possibly contain the answers he sought, the clues to the mysterious displacement that defied logical explanation. The book was titled, simply, Arnold Palmer.

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  Alex 1:46 pm on October 17, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  A Primer on Alternate Realities and Transdimensional Travel 

  Listen along to the audio version:

  A Primer on Alternate Realities and Transdimensional Travel

  It has been said that, at any given moment, there is an infinite number of alternate realities. Some scientific masterminds have compared the effect to standing between two mirrors. Others have said that a better description would be to think about your reality as a novel. However nonsensical or believable the characters and plot might be, it is the reality that you perceive at the moment. You travel from page to sequential page, from beginning to end. You begin the novel innocent and unaware and you’re led along, word after word, to a preset, final end. When you reach the end, there are simply no more words in the book. You close the book and return it to the infinite afterlife of the bookcase. But, imagine that in the middle of reading this novel you go to the bookshelf and take down a completely different book. You open that book in the middle and begin reading to find the same characters that appeared in the pages of the previous book. You’re reading about the same moment in time, but the details are brand new, as if out of another author’s mind. Where a character was a thriving philanthropist in the first book, he has been written as a desperate criminal in the second.

  It’s been suggested that each of these alternate realities are mapped on a large web of counter-balanced polarities and symmetrical juxtapositions – that for every reality, there is an exact mirror inverse that reflects the harmonious order in the cosmic design. Every black has a white, every up has a down, every left has a right, and every Gene Simmons has a Richard Simmons. And it is this order that sustains the continuous momentum of the entire cosmic vastness. These same theorists have suggested that crossing these perfectly balanced polarities would result in a total collapse of, well, everything. Basically, one false move and everything we know, and everything in each of these infinite alternate realities, just ceases to be. Stephen Hawking’s third cousin, Darryl Shatterson, wrote that black holes were trace evidence of that very occurrence. He proposed that each black hole represented what used to be an infinite sea of parallel realities.

  But there are just as many well-intentioned scientists that insist that each of these alternate realities is random and incidental, being spawned at unpredictable moments by splintering from other realities like ripples in a pond or branches on a tree. These experts see no sign of order in this vast ocean of dimensional multiplicity. The vast winding of these timelines is like an urban developer who builds new roads that run parallel to older traffic ways and at other times builds roads that go in no logical direction at all. The roads twist and turn where they need, beginning and ending without warning, crossing at unlikely intersections, and running here and there without winding up where any rational motorist would expect. Many experts insist that these countless alternate realities are even more chaotic and senseless, suggesting that some are not even completely whole. Fragments of some of these dimensional variations have gone missing or are stuck in other realities. This theory has provided substantial scientific explanation for a wide range of phenomenon: time travel, alien abductions, spontaneous combustion, ghostly hauntings, zombification, and Siegfried and Roy, among others. These same experts suppose that something unexplainable in our particular reality would make perfect sense in some other. It’s simply out of place.

  A man in Iowa even suggested that what appear to us to be alternate realities are, in fact, vertically stacked 4×6 note cards in a large cosmic inbox waiting to be sorted.

  Theories on transdimensional travel are as varied as those on alternate realities. Some instruct the curious to sit in a comfortable position and hum while opening their minds to the alternate possibilities until they find themselves aware that they have transcended their reality and are crossed over into another. Witnesses that have applied this approach report two basic outcomes: headaches and leg cramps.
  In a seldom-referred-to spiral notebook labelled “Al and the Pimipicists,” a young Albert Einstein theorized that alternate dimensions could be reached by spinning around in place really, really, really, really fast. His formula claimed that Spin + Fast + Fast + Fast + Fast = Poof! In the margin of his notes the phrase “Transdimensional travel rocks!” is written, suggesting to some that access to other dimensions might involve rocks and stones of some kind.

  In general, transdimensional travel is difficult not because we don’t know how to find them (they sit right on top of our own dimension), but because each unique dimension is protected by an invisible cosmic “skin” that keeps it self-contained. If the skin were not there, elements of the dimensions would float back and forth between dimensions, with no stability or predictability to the universe. The skin is like a Thermos for the infinite alternate realities.

  It is this dimensional dermis that accounts for the resistive nature of transdimensional travel. There are physics at work in this skin that scientists have only recently begun to explore. It seems that within the dimensional dermis there are entirely new, unknown laws of physics. Something similar to gravity (but entirely opposite) is at work, taking any movement through the skin and reversing it, a lot like bouncing off an invisible rubber wall at the circus.

  Many scientists died trying to permeate this dermal covering. Deadly electrical charges build up when in close proximity to the dimensional skin. It’s this electrical phenomenon that causes the occasional static electrical charge that builds up in our body as we graze the “safe zone” around the dimensional skin. This safe zone is referred to as the dimensional epidermis. This epidermis extends into our dimension, attracted to large bodies of water, congested urban areas, the Scottish highlands, supermodels, ivy league universities, and shag carpeting.

  For nearly one hundred years, scientists have accepted that freehand drawing a perfectly round circle would create a vulnerability in the skin of our own dimension, and punching it really hard would open up a portal out of our dimension. From there, they guessed, you could draw circles and punch open doorways into all sorts of dimensions.

  Dr. Hannah Pitt-Partridge, along with abstract artist, Fabio Mario, created a perfectly-drawn circle on the wall of her laboratory in 1985. After carefully considering what to do next, she smashed the photocopier against the wall for an hour until it broke through. She dove into the opening and seconds later yelled back at her assistants, “The void between dimensions looks just like a bathroom!”

  What you find in this book should not prove or disprove any scientific theories on transdimensional travel. Rather, it should suggest that there may be many diverse ways in which to get from one reality to another.

  – Excerpt from “Earl’s Potato Salad” by Will Wood.
  Narrated by Alex (Apple Text-to-Speech).

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  Will 4:44 pm on October 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Remembering “Earl’s Potato Salad” – A New Audio Excerpt 

  Dr. Irving Mosshammer, a geologist from the University of Swipfordshire on a three-year grant studying fossilized human bone calcification and random radioactive regeneration in the deep Australian outback, pulled a large scorpion from his pith helmet and trudged forward.

  Once a month Dr. Mosshammer traveled thirteen miles to Rtakuwima, the nearest village, to trade his hair for live chickens. During one of these trips, Dr. Mosshammer was stopped by a strange desire to lie down on his stomach and claw at the ground. He resisted, choosing to follow the more practical decision-making part of his mind which suggested he whistle a melody from some musical he couldn’t remember the name of. If he would have known then that his sixth sense was simply trying to tell him something, he might have ended up as more than a casual mention in this journal. But, sadly, the doctor explained away the feeling as “a mild irritation caused by these cursed indigenous insects.”

  Six months later, a poor wanderer and prophet, Kali-An-Mana-An, found a large executive envelope filled with note cards buried in the ground only one mile from the village of Rtakuwima.

  – Excerpt from “Earl’s Potato Salad” by Will Wood.
  Narrated by Alex (Apple Text-to-Speech).
  Sound effects and Music by Apple GarageBand.

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  Will 4:07 pm on July 21, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  I Always Hated My Fifth Grade Algebra Teacher 

  I always hated my fifth grade algebra teacher.

  It could’ve been a reflection of my disdain for mathematics in general, but I’m sure it had more to do with the man himself. He possessed the uncanny ability to sense social insecurity. He sniffed it out like a prize hound. And when he found it, he became a medieval torture device to the frail adolescent self-image.

  He sported an obscenely dirty, awkward mustache, flecked with gray. Spit collected in disgusting strands on the ends of the whiskers. When he spoke, his face looked like a spider spinning its web. To make matters worse, he didn’t have enough hair to cover his pale, sticky-looking head. He attempted to cover the bare patch by combing the left-over-bits on the right side of his head across the top, toward the left-over-bits on the left side. This ended up looking, instead, like a hair replacement surgery gone horribly wrong, performed by an inebriated surgeon, who happened to be a chimpanzee.

  His mother visited his office at the school once, to bring sugar cookies. She seemed like someone who had just stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. No one saw the cookies, but several students overheard the mother affectionately call our teacher, “Chitlins.”

  I always hated my fifth grade algebra teacher. And chitlins.

  – Excerpt from “Earl’s Potato Salad” by Will Wood.
  Narrated by Alex (Apple Text-to-Speech).
  Sound effects and Music by Apple GarageBand.

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  Will 4:14 pm on July 16, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Earl’s Potato Salad (Chapter 13) 

  “Seventeen years from now,” Scott Clucas thought, “I will change my name to Darius Fishbowl Rucker.” He will change his name in an attempt to evade arrest. He will be unsuccessful. “Twenty years from now,” he thought, “I will begin serving a thirty-three-year prison sentence for Unlawful Use Of A Microwave Oven.”

  He was somehow certain of these two future events. There were many things about the future that he felt sure of: there are no Cool Ranch Doritos in the future and the Internet has become the primary means of human communication. The future’s not as pleasant as some would have us think.

  That is, in this timeline.

  Seventeen years before Scott changed my name – twenty years before he entered the Harrisburg Disney/Pepsi Correctional Facility – he woke from a coma. There was a doctor named Gary standing over him with a hypodermic needle and a wet towel. He spoke slowly into the room’s intercom.

  “Nurse,” he said, “Can you phone my wife and have her bring my red sweater vest, September’s issue of Medical Monthly, and a piece of key lime pie? Thanks.”

  Dr. Gary looked to be about forty-two and had longer eyelashes than a can-can girl. He stood with his weight on one leg, which suggested a lack of certainty that’s always discouraging in a medical professional.

  Gradually, the coma wore off and Scott found himself acutely aware of the stark white room (maybe a laboratory) and the presence of three nurses, Dr. Gary, some guy with a mop, four corporeal spirits, and a robot that was apparently designed to take stool samples. Then came the 200 mg of Propofol and what had been heightened awareness gradually devolved into the feeling that he was made out of purple Jell-o. Wait…not purple Jell-o, more like blue lava. Blue bubbling lava…I’m in a bath…bubbles…Jell-o…mother…

  “Honey?”

  He heard the voice as if it was in his head. It sounds a little like Lucille Ball on steroids.

  Lucille Ball had never been to Earl’s. She refused to go to the moon. Something about the atmosphere didn’t appeal to her. Lucille Ball did eat potato salad.

  “Honey?”

  Wait, that’s better. More like Shirley Jones.

  Shirley Jones couldn’t eat potato salad, she had a severe potato allergy. One french fry could turn her eyelids inside-out and the palms of her hands glow as bright as a Hawaiian sunset. Shirley Jones had been to the moon.

  “Honey?”

  No, that was definitely in his ear.

  “Scotty?”

  Scott opened his eyes to a beautifully sterile and disgustingly floral hospital room. He knew instantly it was a hospital. No one else mounts their televisions in the farthest, highest corner of the room. And no self-respecting homeowner would design a shower curtain in the middle of their bedroom. The wallpaper was Pepto-pink with oversized chrysanthemums crawling to the ceiling to escape the overpowering smell of disinfectant and soiled bedding. The lamp shades were pink, the window shades were pink, the curtains were pink, even the doors were pink.

  “Scotty, oh my gosh, scotty!”

  A woman grabbed his head and pressed it into her neck. She smelled comfortable but unfamiliar. Like a house he’d never been in but felt he should live in.

  “I knew you’d wake up. I just knew it,” she was crying, “They said they couldn’t be sure, but I knew it.”

  The tears fell on his arm and sent thousands of goosebumps parading across his arms and down his back.

  “I missed you. They said you’d be okay if you ever woke up. They said there wasn’t that much brain damage,” her eyes were opening wider without blinking, “if you woke up soon.”

  “I…” Scott was at a loss for what to say.

  He thought that she had to be hysterical. She was possibly one of those dangerous paranoiacs who tremble every minute with the thought that They are lurking around every corner. Or she could be one of the patients, doped up and on the loose.

  He searched for the emergency call button. His right hand found it and pressed rapidly until it sang a long, loud beep.

  “Scotty, what’s wrong?”

  One of the pink doors swung open and Julia Child strolled in with an IV bag swinging from her ape-sized hand. Her plastic name tag gave revelation to her being there, “Marguerite, Labor and Delivery, St. Anthony Medical Center.”

  “Mr. Clucas!” the walls reverberated with her voice, “You’re awake!”

  Cloudy confusion spilled over Scott’s consciousness. Every thought he had reeled, every memory revolted, every chorus member in his subconscious rang out in one frenzied assault.

  “Surprise, surprise, surprise!” Gomer Pyle repeated from the TV in the far corner against the ceiling.

  Lucille Ball and Shirley Jones met once and formed a secret society. They wrote a list of honorary members to be inducted: Abraham Lincoln, Anne Frank, Leonardo da Vinci, Julius Caesar, Francis Bacon, Florence Nightingale, Charles Dickens, Helen Keller, Prince Albert, Oscar Wilde, Marie Curie, George Orwell, Ringo Starr, Pocahontas, and President Taft. They held one secret meeting and had an argument arose about which sandwiches to bring to the next meeting. The two never spoke again.

  Scott struggled for clarity, “What was I thinking?” he gripped at the edges of sanity, “What was I doing? What was my last memory? I remember a tricycle and a lemonade stand. I remember being frightened, chased by a dog and crying.” He wrestled for a hold on memories that flitted and danced away from focus, “I remember the book report on Thomas Alva Edison.” Then he tried to recall his name, “Calvus? Cartwright? Cantaloupe?” He drew a blank, and then another, and another. “Where do I live?” Nothing. “What is my job?” Nothing.

  “Who am…” the words left his lips as the edges of vision became blurry and his mind closed.

  Through one of the pink doors rolled a robot that looked curiously like he was designed to extract stool samples.

  “Shame, shame, shame!” Gomer Pyle again.

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  Will 6:35 pm on June 29, 2009 Permalink | Reply  

  Earl’s Potato Salad (Chapter 1) 

  Somewhere on the far side of the moon is a small deli shop that makes the best hoagie in our solar system. The deli shop is called Earl’s, after the founder, Earl Hopskhip. The hoagie is called the USS Bon Homme Richard after the WWII carrier. I’ve been to Earl’s twice. I’ve eaten the hoagie (pretty out-of-this-world) and the potato salad (not great). My first visit to Earl’s was uneventful (except for the mind-blowingly-good hoagie) but the second visit changed the fate of the entire known universe. In a dark corner, in the back of Earl’s, is a framed picture of Liberace with the caption, “See you on the flip side!” scrawled in permanent marker above the autographed signature. That photo is the only proof that Earl’s once was, before my time, an intergalactic hot spot for fashionable nightlife entertainment. At Earl’s you might see Fidel Castro sipping Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill while listening to Barbra Streisand backed by a jive band from one of the moons of Saturn. It was that kind of place.

  But all that took place in what is now an alternate reality that runs parallel (but slightly askew) to our own, thanks to that picture of Liberace and Earl’s potato salad.

  Scott Clucas was no stranger to interplanetary travel. During the 1990s he was employed as a staff columnist and editorial cartoonist for the New Brimmswark/East Fork Daily Gazette. The job took him to the far corners of space, writing intriguing little observations about the world of interplanetary politics and entertainment and drawing satirical cartoons of galactic leaders and interstellar entertainment personalities. He had gained a modest amount of adulation for his cartoon of Jupiterian Dictator Aen’on Aen’os shouting, “Douti’a maeo pui maoue!”*

  After a painfully long visit to one of Neptune’s human colonies – the government-sponsored colonies, not the independent anarchistic states now popping up everywhere on Neptune – Scott stopped in at Earl’s for a “small bite of something to get me home” as he put it. He was seated at an oversized pink booth under can lights that could have illuminated an entire football stadium. These days, Earl’s was just a run-down, hole-in-the-crater establishment. The glory days were long devoured and decimated by the chain sandwich huts and quick-stop fast-food abominations now littering every off-earth settlement, the only evidence of its former fame was hanging above this booth. Staring up at the cherubic countenance of Wladziu Valentino Liberace majestically posed among ivory keys and glimmering candles, Scott tried to mentally recreate what must have been a momentous encounter with the galactic pop-culture superstar.

  “Good evenin’ sir,” invited the waitress in an over-affected southern accent, “What can I get fer ya?”

  Something warm…

  “I think I’ll have the red beans and rice,” Scott ordered, tearing his concentration away from the framed image of Liberace.

  “Well, I’m real sorry, sir, but we’re out of rice. The supply rocket from North Korea didn’t make it this week.”

  “Okay, well,” Scott studied her name tag, “That’s okay, Margarine, I’ll just take the potato salad.”

  “Alrighty, sir, I’ll have that right out,” she served, grumbling as she walked away, “It’s pronounced Maar-Gurr-Rine, sheesh.”

  Someone left a folded napkin with a phone number written on it at the far end of the table. It was tucked between the napkin dispenser and the mustard bottle. As Scott unfolded it, he read the message scribbled above the phone number: “Anna Palindrome.” Immediately he recognized the name of the semi-famous professional tennis player that made more of a name for herself as the commercial spokesperson for some brand name household disinfectant. It was nice to see that Earl’s could still draw the right kind of crowd.

  Two doo-wop songs and one grunge chart topper later, Scott was staring at an unwitting instrument of catastrophic and cataclysmic disruption on a plate. The first spoon of potato salad promised potential, but the second one spelled inevitable doom. After he’d eaten half the serving he began to feel light-headed and was experiencing a slight loss of vision. Not a good reaction to the potato salad.

  Quite unexpectedly, and more than a little abruptly, a strange alien dressed as Benjamin Franklin burst into the room carrying a small lizard that was wearing a cowboy hat and a badge that read, “Little Sheriff.” When he (Ben Franklin, not the lizard) screamed, “Where’s my purse?” Scott’s left arm convulsed violently and uncontrollably…

  …the spoon flew from his hand…

  …struck the picture of Liberace…

  …which fell from the wall…

  …crashed onto the plate of potato salad…

  …which flew from the plate to the booth behind him…

  …and there it landed on the worse person to inadvertently toss potato salad on.

  Winky Bob Gillette owned the only three hovercraft dealerships on the moon, the most productive low-gravity steel production plant on Earth, and the most commercially successful record label in outer space, which made him a lunar bigshot. Mr. Gillette’s influence extended into every business operating on the moon because he had practically cornered the market on the necessary low-gravity material, provided at an almost-respectable price.

  Mr. Gillette had three personal bodyguards: Rubus, Maximus, and Larry. Rubus and Maximus were larger than any human you’re likely to find outside of the circus. Larry was Maxamorphian, which meant that he occupied three side-by-side restaurant booths. That’s big, even by interstellar standards. When the projectile potato salad hit the back of their employer’s neck, the bodyguards snapped into action. It’s common knowledge that personal bodyguards generally prefer to be armed with Mercurial Bio-Degradable Hyperdisentigrators and Anti-Plasma Dark Matter Displacement Rifles, and Maxamorphians wouldn’t be caught dead without their Remington P119 Short-Blast Molecular Defusion Pistols. All of these weapons are instant killers and can, on occasion, cause strange anomalies at a subatomic level. It just so happened that three of those anomalies happened at exactly the same time. One subatomic anomaly is dangerous enough, but three simultaneous subatomic anomalies in the same twelve-foot-square space has never happened before.

  Until that moment.

  There was a sound like a bullfrog singing an aria for one-thiry-third of a second. Then silence. Then voices and soft music.

  Arnold Palmer…

  Scott woke on the floor laying on top of what appeared to have been foam seats and ceramic plates. The only thing that he could make sense of was the yellow Post-It note stuck to his chest that read:

  “We’re Sorry, But Your Dimension Has Been Altered. Your timeline has been relocated. Some details and events may have changed. We apologize for any inconvenience this might cause.” Signed, “Management.”

  After a quick inventory of the essential body parts, he tried to recount the recent memories leading up to this moment but found only vague fragments of memories overdubbed with songs from Hello Dolly!

  In the rubble nearby, seeming to have survived the rift in the time-space continuum, were two familiar objects: His leather journal and a framed picture of Liberace. His journal has been very important to him. Scott wrote down everything that happened, minute by minute, in the even that he was hit in the head by a falling chandelier and lost the ability to record and retrieve short-term memories. As it happens, this turned out to be a very fortuitous habit, as everything written in the journal now described an alternate, parallel (but slightly askew) timeline in which he’d previously exited. While everything in the journal had been changed, the occasional identical incident or event could be found to be perfectly identical. But at this point in our story Scott was only aware of his dilemma because of the yellow Post-It note, the leather journal, and the picture of Liberace.

  Just moments before he’d been eating a not-great plate of potato salad at a deli called Earl’s on the far side of the moon. But now he was sitting in a heap of foam and ceramic in the middle of a Barnes and Noble bookstore. For twelve square feet, the ground was littered with pink vinyl, cotton wadding, ceramic shards, and foam. But beyond this were pristine rows of books, magazines, calendars, greeting cards, and novelty gift items. Soothing pop music was drifting down to me from some hidden origin in the ceiling. Dozens of consumers were busily and blissfully checking the new release shelves and browsing the bargain book selections. A group of young retail sales associates with clean name badges labeled “Sebastian,” “Madison,” and “Lindsay,”  was huddled together at the mouth of the Home Improvement aisle discussing which nightclub they might most likely gain access to on the upcoming Saturday night.

  After a nervous cough and what seemed like eight-and-a-half minutes, one solitary sales associate approached the heap of litter with increasing curiosity. “Excuse me, sir,” he stammered, “Can I help you find something?”

  “As you can see, I seem to be lost here,” Scott replied, brushing chalk and dust from the front of his clothes. He picked up the leather journal and the picture of Liberace and asked, “Where can I find books on Transdimensional Phenomenon?”

  * In English, “My face and my fate belong to the masses!” translated by Jupiterian ambassador, John Innerotter, 1995.

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